For Harvard, Year Marked By Decisions and Dissent

Insiders and outsiders. Those who run the University and those who seek to change it. The one group guards its power--though the personalities may change, the voice of authority retains its distinct ring. The others are a more diverse set, pressing concerns both personal and professional.

On different fronts throughout the University, the interests of the two collided during the year. Junior faculty, undergraduates, pro-divestment alumni raised the perennial protest of University policies, and yet many felt frustrated by what one disgruntled Board of Overseers member called "the tyranny of consensus." Harvard, they said, did not encourage dissent, but rather tried, behind-the-scenes, to dissuade the dissenters. Success for these outsiders was measured in small victories--the promotion of a junior faculty member, the election of a progressive overseer, the hiring of a woman or a minority.

Diversity, as many have said, was a unifying theme for the year, if there is such a thing. From the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' latest wave of soul-searching about affirmative action to the appointment of the first woman to the Harvard Corporation, the University's seven-member chief governing board, the incorporation and accommodation of difference marked both faculty and administration. Whether it was the English Department's wrangling over the inclusion of new fields or the Board of Overseers' bitter election campaign, the politics of diversity were ubiquitous.

The players in these struggles were many, from President Derek C. Bok and Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence to the executive director of an activist alumni group and the long-disenfranchised junior faculty of the History Department. One long-time figure, Radcliffe President Matina S. Horner, prepared her departure, and her successor, University of Michigan administrator Linda S. Wilson, was named. Committee chairs and department heads, vice presidents and academic deans continued, as always, to control the day-to-day functions of the University, sometimes answering, sometimes ignoring the host of demands for change.

Bok, after nearly two decades in office, also prepared--at least according to some observers--his eventual departure, making deanship appointments at the Law School and Kennedy School and tying up the loose ends of a long tenure.

His governing boards and administrators, meanwhile, were embroiled in a heated--and divisive--debate about the University's governance. After a Harvard-backed report urged more official control of Overseers elections, pro-divestment alumni upped the stakes in March, announcing the candidacy of South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu for the board. The campaign which followed was marked by some of the most intense rhetoric of the four-year-old movement to change the Overseers' role.

But accommodation seemed not to come easy for administrators and professors used to a higher degree of control. During the heated Board of Overseers campaign, officials joined in the fray, accusing the opposition of not having the University's best interests at stake. And in the Faculty, a new affirmative action plan, released more than a year after undergraduates demanded hiring reform, spurred student protest and professorial skepticism.

In the end, though, the insiders remained in and the others took what they could get.